Her father kept smiling between bites while Veata talked, telling me how he had found his way south to Kampot in 1980, during the famine.

NEWYORKER: Swimming

"Jones, get in here, " he'd bark at me from his office door if he found even one comma out of place in a story I'd edited, or a fact that didn't quite add up.

CNN: Te'o story, big fail for sportswriters

There are only four people who know that he found it -- he and his wife and me and my wife.

CNN: Gold nugget worth $300,000 discovered in Australia

And the thing about Barack for me was that I found that real connection with him because in his life story, I saw so much of my own, truly.

WHITEHOUSE: Remarks by the First Lady at a Campaign Event

He had told me that if the Soviet authorities had found out, he could have lost his job.

BBC: Five minutes of Eurovision fame

He has spent hundreds of hours researching his ties to Bob and was kind enough to share some of what he had found with me.

NPR: Bob Marley's Music and Magic Endure

Amidst all the news coverage and blog posts and celebrity quotes honoring his life upon his death on Wednesday, what I personally found most telling were the number of personal posts by people like you and me expressing a true personal loss at his passing.

FORBES: Steve Jobs: Inspired, and Inspiring